Catching Melania is an upcoming documentary by Slovenian filmmakers Jurij and Tanja Gruden that explores Melania Trump’s rise from small-town Slovenian peasant to First Lady of the United States.
According to the Grudens, who are a husband / wife directorial team, Melania is by far the most famous person in their country’s history.
“She remains one of the most photographed people in the world,” Tanja told iNews. “Whether you like it or not, it attracts attention.”
Yet she remains an enigma for people there, even those who knew her well growing up in Sevnica, a small provincial town about an hour from the country’s capital, Ljubljana.
With Catching Melania, the Grudens hope to make sense of the mystique that surrounds her and understand why she is so ashamed of her homeland.
“She has closed all connections with Slovenia,” says Tanja, noting that most Slovenes who go abroad like to come back and visit once in a while.
Melania, of course, is not most Slovenes.
To try to understand her better, the filmmakers reunited with several of her childhood friends and neighbors, as well as the fashion photographer who “discovered” her for the first time at the age of 21.
One of the interviewees is local puppeteer Bernard Pungercic, who knew Melania as a child. He says he’s made several attempts to hook up with her over the years, but she never responds.
Another interviewee is Melania’s childhood best friend, Jerca Santej, who says, “The only thing I don’t understand is how someone could spend a single second with someone like her husband.”
Fashion photographer Nino Mihalek is also interviewed. He discovered Melania in 1991 when he hired her to pose for a local advertisement promoting a Slovenian dairy farmer.
“I had no idea the photos would be that good,” he recalls. “For me, it was just another shoot.” But when he showed the photos to his colleagues in Milan, “They said, ‘Send her straight.’ And she left.
He never heard from her again.
The only Slovenian interviewed in the document who still has contact with Melania is her lawyer, Nataša Pirc Musar, who represented her in a lawsuit against a tabloid which reported that she was an escort.
Musar describes her as “a very decisive lady and absolutely meticulous in her dealings.”
Although he has made a full documentary on her, Jurij says he is “not a fan” of ex-FLOTUS, but he respects her as “a person with goals”. He describes the film as “an observational tale of ordinary people caught up in a strange event, sprinkled with a dose of humor.”
The Grudens hope to release their project by the end of the year. They say they haven’t heard from Melania’s squad, but if they did, they would be “very happy”.
“I think she will be happy to see her childhood friends again and people she knows very, very well,” says Tanja.
In a way, we doubt it.
And if she’s not, well, Tanja says that would be nice too.
“She would just give us as much publicity as possible if she tried to interfere with our movie.”
“We don’t think our movie says anything that she would like to stop,” adds Jurij. “Much worse things have been said about him. “
Graham Gremore is editor and editor at Queerty. Follow him on Twitter @grahamgremore.
